Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.

1. The Communist Manifesto

Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich EngelsPublication date: 1848Score: 74Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers’ revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.

2. Mein Kampf

Author: Adolf HitlerPublication date: 1925-26Score: 41Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in 1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called “Beer Hall Putsch” that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out “lebensraum” (“living room”) for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao

Author: Mao ZedongPublication date: 1966Score: 38Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People’s Republic of China, enslaving the world’s most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the “Cultural Revolution” he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. “It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism,” wrote Mao.

4. The Kinsey Report

Author: Alfred KinseyPublication date: 1948Score: 37Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. “Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws,” the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. “The report included reports of sexual activity by boys–even babies–and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial.”

5. Democracy and Education

Author: John DeweyPublication date: 1916Score: 36Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a “progressive” philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education–particularly in public schools–and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

6. Das Kapital

Author: Karl MarxPublication date: 1867-1894Score: 31 Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.

7. The Feminine Mystique

Author: Betty FriedanPublication date: 1963Score: 30Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in “a comfortable concentration camp”–a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy

Author: Auguste ComtePublication date: 1830-1842Score: 28Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, “I have naturally ceased to believe in God.” Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term “sociology.” He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond “theology” (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through “metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

9. Beyond Good and Evil

Author: Freidrich NietzschePublication date: 1886Score: 28Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: “‘God is dead’–Nietzsche” followed by “‘Nietzsche is dead’–God.” Nietzsche’s profession that “God is dead” appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power,” and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Author: John Maynard KeynesPublication date: 1936Score: 23Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite–educated at Eton and Cambridge–who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

Though I may agree with some of your perspectives regarding some of the books on this list, I cannot but dissent with regard to Nietzsche’s _Beyond Good and Evil_. Not only have you read it (if you read it at all) with obvious convictions and cherry-picking as to Nietzsche’s terminology, you obviously have not read the book either in context of Nietzsche’s whole enterprise, or even in context with itself!

Simply because Nietzsche criticized “slave” morality (ex. Christianity and socialism) it does not follow that he therefore embraced some sort of authoritarian regime (aka “the blonde beast”). He explicitly states as much throughout his work and in _Genealogy of Morals_ in particular.

I, too, find it repugnantly dishonest on your part to play an anachronistic game of guilt by association because the Nazis cherry-picked certain notions and terminology out of his work. Then again, it’s you guys who are usually in the business of winnowing certain people and periods from Christianity when they no longer suit your purposes, even while these same people and periods, with their acts of violence and barbarity, were in the “name of Christ.” Or, in another case, perhaps Plato should have never written given that he later inspired Marx.

Oh yeah, and had you bothered to do a little research you would find that Nietzsche expressly *hated* his anti-semitic brother-in-law as well as being wary of his shrewish sister. Your Nietzsche = Nazi equation is puerile at best.

The books that are the most dangerous are the heaviest ones, as the weight of the book is obviously its most dangerous attribute.

gailcat

Silent Spring? The Kinsey Report? The Origin of the Species? You reveal your bias and lack of intellectual curiosity by listing many of the books you did as “harmful.” When is your next book burning? I have some books I’d like to throw into the flames. The book stores are filled with Palin, Coulter, et. al. and they will burn very well. But, of course, I wouldn’t do that. Limiting books to read is, well, similar to what Germany did pre-WWII. Remember?

heathernicolern

“He (Marx) could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent
society based on capitalism and representative government that people
the world over envy and seek to emulate.” – summary of Das Kapital, above.

Um, what world are these people living in?

I think that “portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human
society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by
paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible
profits” is fairly accurate and has been pretty much proven by our recent recession. We have few real jobs left in America, because – since CEOs NEED to make $6million/year – all of our labor-intensive jobs have been sent to Mexico, China, Taiwan, etc; we thought our intellectual jobs were safe, and would stay here and help our economy, but then companies realized that people in India would be more than capable and willing to do those jobs for us. So our economy has no grounding in real products or services and is highly susceptible to, well, recession.

heathernicolern

So true. And they have definitely been the longest-running. The Nazis are gone. Stalin is gone. Marx is gone. But the Pope is still around – hiding child abuse, telling a country dying of Aids that condoms will send them to hell . . . And with the advent of new technology, Islam no longer needs a sword to wage jihad on the infidel, and each other. Now they have bombs and planes.

BrodeoClown

Corporatism is not capitalism. Capitalism is unhindered by the State. Corporatism, what we have, is regulated, manipulated, lobbied, taxed incessantly, marked by favoritism, upheld through restricting competition through “anti-trust” laws, unionized coercively, etc.
c
Capitalism isn’t legal in the US, and hasn’t been in some time. It’s time that it is…

http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/4VFTMV2IPQ4LUCPWM47HEHLMQQ Mark

THIS IS PART TWO OF MY RESPONSE TO MIKE THURLOW’S POST OF JULY 26, 2011.

3. Now Her [sic]father Otto Frank, also believed to be killed in the gas chamber, was actually transferred to another camp, when[sic] the Germans abandoned. He died in Switzerland of old age, in the year 1980.”
Like the quote concerning Anne Frank, the above quote about Otto Frank, Anne’s father, also contains numerous errors. Actually, after arriving at Auschwitz, Otto Frank was not transferred to another camp, rather he remained incarcerated at Auschwitz until it was liberated by the Red Army. That is a rather minor error in comparison to the other error contained within the quote. Given your absurd conspiratorial ramblings about “what you hear in school” versus what you think actually occurred, it is obvious you are implying that the information you are revealing about Otto Frank concerning his supposed death in the gas chamber and his actual death in Switzerland three and a half decades later is knowledge that a group of individuals was trying to hide, for whatever reason. Such an implication is absolutely hilarious, for lack of a better word. The only people who believed Otto Frank died in the gas chamber are those who are, like you, completely ignorant of the facts surrounding the fate of the Franks. The information has been widely known for decades, contrary to what you are implying with your conspiratorial “what you hear in school” bullsh*t. Who do you think typed, edited and had published the first edition of Anne Frank’s diaries? Who do you think supervised the film adaptation of the diaries? And who do you think spearheaded the fundraising efforts for the building of the Anne Frank museum, now located in Amsterdam? That’s right, the answer to all three questions is OTTO FRANK. The notion that the real circumstances surrounding the death of Otto Frank were hidden from the public is absolutely ludicrous. Otto Frank was a well-known figure who very publicly discussed his daughter and her legacy. He was in the public eye far too often for anyone to even try and lie about his supposed death in a gas chamber in the 1940s.

4. “Stalin was most definitely NOT a dictator or a bureaucrat and the Great Terror wasn’t in actuality the effect of Stalin trying to root out German infiltrations in his army.”
So it seems not only are you a holocaust-denier, you are also a disciple of Walter Duranty. Stalin wasn’t even a bureaucrat? What are you going to claim next, that Hitler wasn’t Fuhrer and in actuality couldn’t have even been elected dog catcher in Germany? For someone you claim was NOT dictator, the Soviet government apparatus sure as hell acted like Stalin’s word was law. Are you going to tell us that Stalin merely suggested, rather than ordered, the purges that occurred every few years. Are you going to claim that the power struggle that occurred after Lenin’s death never really occurred and that Stalin never came out of on top? Or perhaps you are going to claim, in Durantyesque fashion, and despite mountains of evidence, that Stalin didn’t deliberately cause the famines that killed millions in the Ukraine? Boy for someone who wasn’t even a bureaucrat, Stalin sure wielded a lot of power in the Soviet Union. Heck, calling you a disciple of Duranty probably wouldn’t be accurate because even he knew that Stalin called the shots in the Soviet Union.
5. “Of course you’re right, no true Communist (as Marx and Engels most were) could ever perpetuate death and mayhem on their fellow countrymen.”

And of course, what would an argument concerning communism be without someone bringing up the lame and laughable “all those communist regimes that massacred and enslaved millions aren’t TRUE communists” bullsh*t argument. It is all just a coincidence, right? Yeah, sure, I guess you could argue that, as long as you completely ignore the Communist Manifesto’s discussions of the use of violence in the service of the revolution, in addition to the advocacy of the widespread theft of property, the supreme power of the state etc. You have to be a naive moron to believe that Marx didn’t think it would take violence to accomplish those goals. Why do I make that assertion? Because even Marx’s staunchest modern day supporters have admitted that the Communist Manifesto has a violence problem. The notion that there is no connection between the ideology of the Communist Manifesto and the practices of various communist regimes is absolutely laughable.

Not only have you shown that you can’t even be bothered with the basic facts concerning the topics to which you claim expertise, you have also shown yourself to be a Holocaust denier, an anti-semite and an apologist for Stalin as well. You have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are an odious human being not to be taken seriously. Frankly I am surprised you didn’t quote from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.

PS The Fox News reference was beyond lame, but completely expected from an idiot like you.

http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/4VFTMV2IPQ4LUCPWM47HEHLMQQ Mark

THIS IS PART ONE OF A TWO PART RESPONSE TO MIKE THURLOW’S POST OF JULY 26, 2011. THE SECOND PART IS LOCATED DIRECTLY BELOW THIS POST.

Your post is, without a doubt, the most embarrassing piece of garbage I have read in an internet comment section for a long time. It is no secret that you lack a basic command of the facts regarding the subjects you are discussing. But with the above post you have also revealed yourself to be a special type of sh*t that is usually referred to as “Holocaust-denier”. You also seem to be trying to dismiss Joseph Stalin’s role in the mass-murder perpetrated by the Soviet Union during Stalin’s tenure. And in ending your post, you throw in a completely expected and completely lame insult directed at Fox News. I am shocked you didn’t find a way to mention Sarah Palin too. It is hard to believe that you looked at the garbage you wrote and seemingly said to yourself “man, this will show him”.

in order to make it easier on me, I have organized my replies to various quotes in numerically-labelled sections.

1. “…you can believe the holocaust happened the way you’re told it happened (even though the 5-6 million tons of human ash from Auschwitz alone has mysteriously vanished).”
The above quote represents Holocaust-denial in its most basic form, the notion that the scholarly consensus, arrived at after years of meticulous research, is just a bunch of lies, guided by conspirators. I mention the conspiracy part as it is obvious with your claims of ash “mysteriously vanish[ing]” that you are trying to imply some sort of conspiracy. If Holocaust-denial wasn’t so odious, the above quote would be one of the funniest things I have ever read? Why? Because of the absolutely ludicrous assertion concerning the amount of ash that supposedly has disappeared from Auschwitz. The vast majority of reputable Holocaust scholars have concluded that around 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis. Anyone with an IQ above three knows that all of those murders did not take place at one death camp. This is one of the reasons why the notion that 5-6 million TONS(that is no typo) has disappeared from Auschwitz is so ridiculous. But perhaps I am wrong and the 6 million dead and the 6 million TONS of ash number is pure coincidence. Now, having seen only a very few cremation urns in my lifetime in person, I am no expert, yet I feel that I can assert fairly confidently that the remains contained in them only weigh a few pounds. Yet reading your asinine quote, you would have us believe that 10-12 BILLION POUNDS of human cremation remains disappeared from Auschwitz. You would have had to cremate virtually everyone on the face of the Earth during the WWII-era to create that much ash by weight. The notion that 5-6 million TONS of ash disappeared from Auschwitz alone is beyond absurd.

2. You claim that the following quote comes from an article you wrote on Anne Frank(yeah, sure it did). Not surprisingly, the quote contains multiple errors of fact, yet you have the nerve to tell me that I need to do research. There is a quote in the Bible about motes, beams and eyes that applies to you. Here is your error-filled quote concerning Anne Frank: “Anne Frank. Most people have heard about Anne Frank. Well it’s BS. Anne Frank and her father were chosen to work in Auschwitz. However Anne Frank caught Typhoid in Spring of 1945. She remained at Auschwitz, when the Germans abandoned the camp. She was left behind in a hospital wing, where she died. She was not killed in a gas chamber.”

First I have to say I just love how you seem to be implying that being chosen to work in Auschwitz was some sort of benign assignment and the fact she died of disease, instead of in a gas chamber, somehow absolves the Nazis of responsibility for her death. OK let us get to the errors. Firstly, Anne Frank did not remain at Auschwitz, as you claim. She, along with her sister Margot, was transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died. Secondly, Anne Frank died of tyPHUS, not tyPHOID. Those diseases may have similar spellings, but they are not even remotely related. Thirdly, scholars have known all along that Anne Frank died of tyPHUS, thus your statement that scholars have been spreading “BS” about Frank dying in a gas chamber is pure garbage.

PART TWO IS BELOW

http://twitter.com/WeaklyThought Magnus

This is hilarious and delusional to the point of depravity. What so many right-wing anti-Keynesians argue is that Keynes advocates massive government and deficits, etc. What Keynes actually argued was that, when times were good, Government should cut spending and increase savings, so that when the economy suffered this money could be reinvested in the public sector – meaning more jobs and more money floating about in the economy so people could spend their way out of recession.

What actually happens the world over is that government run a deficit even when times are good and cut taxes (i.e. they try and live by Reaganomics policies) and yet when times are hard they borrow and spend even more so they drop further into recession. All of this means normal workers suffer while CEOs and politicians line their pockets and corporate interests flourish at our expense.

Hahahah, As if homosexuality were as bad as anti-semitism…Talk about a double standard. Sounds like a good conservative to me.

Mark: you need to realize how stupid your are. Just take a minute and reflect on it. Okay, I hope you realized it by now, maybe an hour has passed by. Good. Now, I would bet a lot of cold-hard cash (your favorite thing in the world, right?) that you have never even read a lick of Marx. If you did, you would understand that Marx was highly impressed by the fluidity of capitalism. Not only so, but he was an avid reader of Adam Smith. Something I know you weren’t aware of. But, just like all these conservative nutjobs, you’re afraid. You fear the brilliance of Marx, because he could dismantle all the power you have in this world, and his theories create the means for a democratic utopia. Honestly, people like you are the cause of capitalism’s own destruction…and you don’t even realize it. You’re a fucking sheep, and, subconsciously, you know it. So, continue to disseminate currency like madman, because you’re just helping the cause. Capitalism destroys itself by its own rules. That’s Marxism for you. So, when you buy your penis pump, remember that you’re Marxist…because you’re contributing to your own “demise”.

Good day, comrade.

Beemish

So, what books aren’t harmful, and how exactly are you defining harm? I mean, you appear to be suggesting that any book with possible leftist associations is harmful, but then you also list Hitler and Nietzsche, the first of whom was certainly anti-communist and the second of whom can only be associated with leftist thought through a certain amount of tweeking. What’s more the tendency to collapse leftist thought into the specters of Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Great Leap Forward forgets that every ideology, including liberal democracy and most certainly free market capitalism, has had its tyrannical variants. It would appear that the assemblers of this list don’t care much for ideas. Most important books and thoughts have, in one way or another, been associated with harm. Plato,

Mark is the Bible responsible for the millions killed by the Spanish inquisition, The Crusades, antisemitism (because some stupid people in the past blamed the death of Jesus on the entire followers of Judaism, like the ignorants who blame all Muslims for all the jihadist terrorism), the Salem witch Trials, the religious wars during the Reformation etc etc? No,The things is what Marx, Engels and other socialists envisaged was nothing like the Stalinist dictatorships of the 20th century. Marx can hardly be blamed for what others did in his name, like Jesus cannot be blamed for what people did in his.
As all I am trying to do is make a valid intellectual point.please no name calling, I think you are bit above all that, Even if you disagree with my point I can respect your views I hope you can do the same for mine.
Thank you,
Duggy Johnstone

Romney

Mark, you suck at life. I hope you get in a car crash.

Guest

How the heck is Silent Spring on this list?

Doomroar

… “He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.” funny that it is going on an economic depression…

“portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits.” Thank God this never happened, oh.. wait it is happening right now…

Yet another ridiculous response to my post. Hey, why don’t you do me a favor and actually read the Bible. When you are done, you can point out the passages that advocate the execution of heretics, etc. Good luck finding them. Then when you are done, read the Communist Manifesto. You won’t have any problem finding passages that advocate for use of violence in the name of “revolution?. Yeah, you’re analogy is kind of lame, to say the least.

Your are right. Environmentalism and Communism are religions and killed hundreds of millions in less than a century.

gennarosenatore

this list is lame

Dian Atamyanov

You have obviously never read the Bible.

Dian Atamyanov

You are so right, because equating “The Origin of Species” to “Mein Kampf” is not a sign of the intellectual deficit and complete lack of impartial standards by those who compiled this list.

Tell me, does a work like “On Liberty” by Mill deserve to be lumped in the same boat as Hitler’s and Mao’s writings?

Nicholas Stalnaker

How is Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead(or Ayn Rands entire bibliography for that matter) not on this list?

Just Sayin

Looks like you have a broken relationship with Reality.

1tomritter1

Look at #5. (Democracy and Education by John Dewey).

Forget for a minute that democracy is a dirty word and consider this:

What is the tenth plank of The Communist Manifesto?

joemog

It just DOES, okay?! Sheesh.

matturn

Surely only a nation with outstanding thinkers would lead the world in scientific and financial services!

TechnosaurusRex

I would have to ask which nation you are specifically referring to – the US or the UK. I certainly believe that both nations still make huge contributions in terms of scienctific research and development. The problem is that other nations like China and India are catching up rapidly. And of course, the Japanese have always been the masters when it comes to improving and miniaturising other people’s technology. With regard to financial services, I only mentioned them because (in the UK at least) they represent such a large chunk of our GDP. I would actually venture to say that the only “service” rendered to humanity by financial institutions and their executives (on both sides of the pond) in recent years is to royally screw things up for the rest of us.

The point I was trying to make is that, educationally speaking, the UK and US are both in decline. The abandonment of academic rigour (which is presumably what Americans like to call “dumbing down”) might well lead to the creation of more graduates, but their qualifications will in many cases not be worth the paper on which they are printed. This will ultimately impact on our ability to compete in all areas, including the ones we currently appear to dominate. I reiterate my main point, which is that academic excellence only comes through hard work and self discipline, and we seem to have lost our way in that respect.

nevilleross

For that matter, why isn’t anything by Horatio Alger on this list?

nevilleross

More like you do.

nevilleross

The only morons are you and people like you who believe this article and what’s being said.

Devin Ens

What an excellent reading list, other than Mein Kampf, which is just a bunch of barely coherent raving. I’m actually surprised that people who hate liberalism would put Hitler on a don’t-read list, since he’s the perfect example of an ultra-conservative.

Bashing J.S.Mill? What’s next bashing the thoroughly liberal American Declaration of Independence?
Bashing Keynes, who’da thunk there are Americans who hate FDR for saving their economy? I guess conservatives would rather have let the great depression last forever.

Devin Ens

Huh? I get that communist states have committed as many atrocities as other states, but who ever was “killed” by “environmentalism”? What an odd comment, or failed joke.

Devin Ens

Good grief, you’re stupid.

Adriana Medina

I have read some Marx and at least come across some of the others s a grad student in English. I find that though they may be dangerous, we should still read them. They give us insight to the other side.

Alex Young

why is Foucault on this list?

http://herberthamaral.com/ Herberth Amaral

I see, you may not know about DDT and Africa. When DDT was banned, many Africans died because they did not had the money to buy DDT substitutes.

Kropotkin1936

HA! Hahhahahhahahahahhahahahhahahahahahahhahaha
hahahhahahahahhaha… but really, I thought that these days you guys at least tried to pretend you were about “freedom” or whatever, and not the stereotypical backwards old white fascist

dou

What absoulte drivel. Once again we see that there is no such thing as a “conservative scholar”

facefault

Common misconception, actually. DDT was never banned. It’s just now used only for indoor spraying in houses, rather than outdoor spraying on fields. This is a good thing, because only using it indoors makes mosquitoes encounter it less and therefore build up resistance more slowly. (DDT’s become pretty much useless in all of South Asia and much of South America due to resistance).

Joe

Hitler was a socialist. Learn to history.

tom dissonance

“The Origin of Species” as an honorable mention. What a laughable list, panel and website.

tom dissonance

In fact, apart from Mein Kampf and Nietzsche, this is actually a great reading list. So thanks to your awful judges for inadvertently using their terrible beliefs to come up with something good.

DigitalRain

I’ve read books where the Hebrews committed acts that by today’s standards would be called genocide.

Ryan Davis

I think, if I swivel to look at this from a..slightly jingoistic, Christian-centered, conservative point of view I can understand most of these selections. The two I don’t (entirely) understand are “The Feminine Mystique” – although, I guess I can imagine there might be one or two knuckle-draggers left alive in this country who actually think, “guh, gender equality? Bad.” But I was reasonably sure they were all dead from old age or too much brandy; And the honorable mention of “On Liberty” – it’s a pro-democracy, pro-free market, pro-individual rights, almost nudging towards Libertarian treatise. Seems like it might be on your ten most positive list. Maybe a misprint or something. I’d love to hear from any of the judges on this.